“It’s a wonderful life” and Idealist.org
Monday, February 5th, 2007In the last post, I talked about entering the “Saturday afternoons” business. Which is really like the “wonderful life” business, getting people together and pooling resources and building community like Jimmy Stewart’s character in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” minus the guy in the wheelchair who owns all the property and smirks.
Tonight I went to one of the several hundred meetings worldwide this week inspired around Idealist.org. Idealist’s founder Ami Dar had sent out an email. It started:
“My name is Ami Dar and I am the director of Idealist.org. I am writing to invite you to imagine a better community and a better world, and to see how we can build it together, starting right now.”
9 people were at this meeting in Park Slope, Brooklyn. We each had big things we’d like to see in the world — shifting awareness from popular entertainment to local schools, cleaning up the environment, etc. And then we each have specific things we’d like to do a little bit more of — getting to know a more diverse bunch of people, working with kids and art, etc.
It was interesting to see how there was so much overlap of issues and so much openness/flexibility on what we work on as a group. One of the participants got the idea to see a space created in Park Slope where people go for “one more need met, one more person met.”
I really like that.
My specific thing I’d like more of is more diversity. To interact with people who are in arts and business and doctors and teachers. It’s so hard to get my friends from different industries to get together. They’re all suspicious when they know occupations will be different. When I was marketing director at a $60 million company, the sales and the marketing guys didn’t even trust each other. But I got them working together, and as we worked together, we built trust and realized we all wanted the same things.
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